Jerky Shop Marks One Year in Warsaw, Expands to Webster
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Jordan Fouts-
He considers himself a sommelier of sorts, but Jerky Shop owner Tom Bentele also resembles a kid in a candy store. Bentele makes and sells a variety of unique jerky flavors both in his Warsaw store, opened a little over a year ago, and in North Webster, opened earlier this year. The counters of both shops are lined with glass cookie jars whose labels describe flavors like hamburger with dill pickle, scorpion pepper and steak and garlic mashed potatos. Whenever he gets a new customer in, Bentele has them try a little of everything while describing what flavors they’ll detect as they chew – the different tastes in the burger with pickle variety or steak with potatos come in gradually, one at a time, as they reach different taste receptors on the tongue. It’s a little like the three-meal gum devised by eccentric candymaker Willy Wonka. “Too much day drinking is what happened,” Bentele joked about coming up with the steak and potato jerky. Other flavors include sweet heat, with horseradish; meat candy, made with smoked brown sugar; and back woods steak, which tastes exactly as you’d expect. He has about 25 flavors in his repertoire currently, and puts around a dozen of them out at a time, both staples and weekly specials. They sell for $7 for a 3-ounce bag or $4 for a baggie of smaller pieces, which he calls gravel. They also ship worldwide, sell at festivals in the area and are in a vending machine in Fort Wayne. They made birthday cake flavor to celebrate the shop’s first year. Bentele is currently trying to perfect coffee, chai tea and bloody mary. “It sounds weird but it tastes good,” he said. “It just needs a good name.” He also promises he’s going to get a nametag that says “jerky sommelier” on it soon. “I treat it like a wine tasting. If I get someone in and they try all the jerky, nine times out of 10, they come back with more people and want to try more flavors,” he said this month in the North Webster store, after helping a customer from San Francisco sample the day’s flavors before deciding on a bag of original. “It’s like a tourist trap. I had some people from Colorado come in, and this was the first place they went.” He opened the Warsaw store last spring when it was clear that his hobby was threatening to take over the house. So he leased the former Brown Bag Deli at 206 S. Buffalo St. and bought 200 pounds of meat to prepare – and sold out in a day. It continued every day for a week, so his wife, Lisa, agreed to come help. He prepares hundreds of pounds of jerky a week in 25-pound batches at a time, from cuts of bottom round with the fat removed. They’re left to drain just enough so they suck up brine like a sponge without getting too salty, he said. Then they go into “flavor town,” marinating in the seasoning for two to 12 hours. “I like jerky, I’ve always made it, and I got it down to a science,” he said. “It’s very humbling, that it’s just stuff I make and people like it. One of the reviews we got on Facebook calls it the ‘8th Wonder of the World.’” The jerky is made with no gluten or nitrates, which means no chemical taste but also a shorter shelf life, from the two years of store-bought jerky to four or five months if unrefrigerated. But, he noted, “If you don’t eat the jerky I sell you in a couple days, why buy it? Life’s too short to eat bad jerky.” Find Jerky Shop online at ajerkyshop.com or facebook.com/ajerkyshop.
